Cities are a boon for public health—even now. As public-health experts have known for decades, people who live in a city are likely to walk and bike more often, and they live closer to community services such as grocery stores. Urban density also supports faster emergency-response times, better hospital staffing, and a greater concentration of intensive-care beds and other health-care resources. Yet despite ample evidence that urbanites live longer and healthier lives than their counterparts ...

The scooter-sharing market faces temporary disruption due to coronavirus (COVID-19) but the industry can weather the storm in the longer term, new analysis suggests. By 2024, 4.6 million shared scooters will be in operation worldwide, up from 774,000 in 2019, according to a new forecast from IoT analyst firm Berg Insight. Berg Insight expects to […]

Although pandemics have long been a tragic scourge on our cities, they’ve also forced architecture and city planning to evolve. The bubonic plague, which wiped out at least a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century, helped to inspire the radical urban improvements of the Renaissance. Cities cleared squalid and cramped living quarters, expanded

California's push for density, supporting policies to encourage using transit and building housing near job centers, has a new enemy: the coronavirus.

Cities of the future: Dreaming of a smart urban revolution

In this podcast episode, APA's Jo Peña talks with Nupur Gunjan, a public sector analyst at Cisco, about the issues surrounding data protection and cybersecurity that have become top of mind in the wake of COVID-19.

Social distancing has turned urban life upside down, but what changes will persist?

The genesis and spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 have transformed urban social life across the world. In this essay, I show how COVID-19 epitomizes but does not exclusively define global reach of China's cities, which is weaving new interconnections between humans and non-humans, including viruses and endangered wildlife. Through exploring the cultural politics of taste surrounding wild and endangered ocean fare, I illustrate how sourcing to satisfy China's urban demand exacerbates ocean wildlife populations. Finally, I reflect on how the emerging pandemic is transforming urban life in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region. These lenses bring into sharp relief the entanglements of urban China's global reach with more-than-human worlds.

Early intervention, or population density? NPR reporters based in the Bay Area and New York City offer explanations as to why the two regions are seeing such a wide contrast in experiences during the coronavirus outbreak.

Source: archdaily.comAnyone who's been in the urbanism game as long as I have (or longer) is probably familiar with the annual Places Rated Almanac, the annual metro area rank

Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

SERENA E. ALEXANDER, PHD Serena Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at San José State University. Her primary research interests are in the areas of environmental planning, climate action, and land-use and transportation planning. Before joining the SJSU faculty, Dr.

Americans on social media are expressing a newfound appreciation for suburban homes and cars.

(Bloomberg) -- Dockless scooter companies charged into cities in 2018, promising a mobility revolution with cheap, clean rides and billions in venture capital backing. Yet they soon faced roadblocks, including shaky business models, safety concerns, and fast-moving city regulators. At the start of 2020

Christopher Cabaldon Discusses Regenerating Cities and Transforming Communities in reSite Podcast.

Landscape architects who seek to create social connections, not social distance, are grappling with how the coronavirus might alter our cities’ plazas and parks.

Evidence-based research can help planners create truly healthy communities. No junk-science please.

FUSE Corps is a nonprofit organization that enables local government to more effectively address the biggest challenges facing urban communities.

Better walking, biking, and transit

San Jose lawmakers on Tuesday unanimously approved creating a new land use designation for mobile home parks that would prevent hundreds of low-income residents from being forced to lose their homes as developers eye the land to build extravagant new homes. The stricter redevelopment protections will apply to all 58 mobile home parks in the...

In little over a generation, Singapore has quickly grown from a third-world nation to a first-world country. The island nation’s need to make meaningful use of every inch of its near 280 square miles of territory meant that planners and developers had to get creative. With the help of Esri technology, Singapore produced a living digital twin to see exactly...

As metropolitan areas expand rapidly to fit the world’s ever-growing population, a first-ever global study of street networks indicates that sprawling roads are on the rise, cementing a future in many places where relying on personal vehicles is the norm. Streets crowded with carbon-spewing commuters are an obvious source of greenhouse gas emissions. But the layout of a community’s streets might be the driving force behind a person’s preferred transportation. Adam Millard-Ball, a co-author o...

But California still leads by a wide margin.

Planetizen's annual list of the best of the planning Internet gives a taste of the technological and editorial milieu of the urban planning Internet at the beginning of a new decade.

Lea esto en español. The functions of today’s green are defined mainly by the needs that were conceived in the hygienist movement linked to the industrial city of the nineteenth century. Environmental pollution was the driving force behind public open spaces at that time, and at that time, the need for socialization and recreation was … Continue reading Tree Planting in Green Urban Infrastructure →

According to Urban Catalyst founder Erik Hayden, thanks to a tax break offered to help low-income communities, the time has finally come for downtown San Jose to stop being overshadowed by San Francisco’s towers and Silicon Valley’s tech campuses.

Lisa Hamilton interviews Ben Hecht, the president and CEO of Living Cities. Their conversation focuses on America’s urban landscape and explores opportunities to reduce poverty, drive innovation and promote equity and inclusion in cities across the nation. Click here to listen to the episode.

Some city planners implement equity planning; evaluating urban planning decisions through the prism of how they would affect the least advantaged residents.

From Amazon to Nextdoor to Elon Musk, here’s 10 ways we went so wrong.

Democrats rely heavily on urban voters for support, but the states that hold the first caucuses and primaries don't have really big cities. That tends to leave them off the campaign agenda.

The 62,000 members of this urbanist Facebook group are doing more than just making weird memes. (But they are making a lot of weird memes.)

The Envision San José 2040 General Plan establishes a four-year review cycle, providing opportunity to evaluate the City’s achievement of key goals and mid-course adjustments to the General Plan. This work will be done through open, public meetings of the Envision San José 2040 Task Force and City Council. The City is currently undergoing its second four-year review cycle from Fall 2019 to Spring 2020. To view past efforts, visit the General Plan Four-Year Review Cycle #1 (2015/2016) page. En...

This decade has witnessed rapid expansion of the San Francisco Bay Area, with the addition of three Central Valley (CV) metro areas, Stockton, Modesto and Merced. Over the same period, growth has shifted from San Francisco to its exurban metropolitan areas.

South Bay YIMBY’s vision for the development of the Diridon Station Area is of a vibrant, diverse, affordable and sustainable new neighborhood in the heart of San Jose. Making the most of this opportunity will require bold and proactive leadership from the city of San Jose to address key challenges with the current land use in the Diridon area. Growth of the Diridon area should benefit all San Joseans, regardless of race, gender or socioeconomic status. It should be a place where everyone fee...